It has been nearly a year since the city stupidly closed St. Vincent's hospital in Manhattan. Hospitals routinely lose money, mostly because of their emergency room and ICU care since these facilities are designed specifically to save lives rather than make money. I know this from having worked in hospitals as a researcher and working with physicians. So hospitals make money through other aspects of their care, but lose gobs of money when they take emergency and critical care cases. Our healthcare system, which leaves a substantial number of people uninsured and therefore dependent on emergency rooms for more routine care, puts added stress on our hospitals. So the ideal way to fix the system is with single payer healthcare. That would take the unnecessary burden off our emergency rooms and hence our hospitals. Too bad the Republicans refuse to do that.

Then we have idiots like Bloomberg who feel that a hospital has to make money or be closed down. Let's remember something: the goal of a hospital is to save lives, not make money. But the more important ECONOMIC fact that Bloomberg ignores is that when you close a hospital like St. Vincent's, you are taking away an emergency room, and that means that those patients who would normally go to that emergency room now either do not get any care, or they go to another hospital. That puts MORE of a burden on other hospital emergency rooms making THEIR financial situation worse. It is a dangerous spiral where you essentially make all hospitals worse off every single time you close one hospital. It is STUPID. Yet that is our system. We need better, not worse, hospital coverage in NYC. One local activist, Yetta Kurland, has been on top of this.

This comes from Yetta Kurland:

In exactly one week we will rally at the site of St. Vincent’s on Sunday October 17th at 2pm to demand the full restoration of services taken away when St. Vincent’s was wrongfully closed in April.

Here are some recent articles that have exposed the serious life and death situation our community is in and the fact that these problems aren’t decreasing, but increasing.

The Chief of Emergency Care at Bellvue, the closest trauma one hospital, calls the closing of St. Vincent’s a “significant disaster”. Please spread the word and forward the videos below as well to as many as you can, post them on your facebook if you have one and forward them by email. We must get a large turn out on October 17th to let our public officials know we will not stop until we have a hospital back.

Yetta

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/10/10/2010-10-10_st_vincents_cl...

http://www.citylimits.org/news/articles/4203/aftershock-manhattan-hospit...

http://DemandAHospital.blogspot.com/